


star charts

by losebetter



Series: a cartography of hope [1]
Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Backstory Speculation - Freeform, Character Study, Childrens Are Jerks (thanks beau), Fjord Feelings, Gen, Self-Mutilation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-03
Updated: 2018-05-03
Packaged: 2019-05-01 15:31:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,765
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14523681
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/losebetter/pseuds/losebetter
Summary: So he doesn't remember what the problem had been. But he remembers the vague outlines of the healer's face, because it had been the first one Fjord had ever copied and worn himself, almost four years later.He'd done it with shaking hands in front of an abandoned shop window, just enough time to see that he hadn't left any of his mossy skin visible, and then he'd pulled his hood up, adjusted his pack against his back where it was light with food and a stolen star map, and disappeared.But, perhaps he’s getting ahead of himself.





	star charts

**Author's Note:**

> i had about half of this fic floating around in my wips, then episode 16 inspired me to finish it up!
> 
>  **beware the self-mutilation tag!** this didn't feel appropriate to warn for graphic violence, but the rating is what it is because the gore is still kind of a lot to handle and may be disturbing to folks who are sensitive to that kind of thing. (for reference, it has to do with messy, partially self-inflicted mouth injuries.) a lot of fjord's perspective is also pretty warped around his self-image issues, so do tread mindfully.
> 
> this was originally something i wanted to turn into a comic, but i've been so spent from work & other responsibilities that i knew it would never get done - so i apologize if the pacing is too wonky for you! i figured it was better to get it done in this form than to just let the idea die. any resulting errors are the fault of the author who will be flogged, etc

It isn't strange for orcs to leave their mutts behind - in fact, it's become common enough that Fjord gets the chance to grow up, because he is lucky to be born and dropped on the outskirts of a bustling township that houses an orphanage to serve that exact need.

His memories of being a child are foggy, muddled like water in his ears (and he tries not to think about why that is) - but he remembers that someone had been there to watch over him, that someone had taught him how to walk and how to perform basic manual labor without letting his claws damage anything, and that from his bed on the second floor of the building, there had been a caved-in patch of roof that had allowed him to see the stars.

The only other thing he remembers clearly is an overwhelming quiet - in his head, in his throat. Fjord at six doesn't like to talk to anyone, and by age ten he is already so much smaller and weaker than the others that they don't like to talk to him, either.

There had been a healer who had come, a human with a sharp, unfriendly chin who had shaved his head and pushed him forward by the back of his skull, poking and prodding at his neck - but he'd been ten then, and sometimes nowadays it feels like his memories are waterlogged, feelings soft and torn like soaked pages, the people he'd known floating up and out of his head as if they'd drowned. 

So he doesn't remember what the problem had been. But he remembers the vague outlines of the healer's face, because it had been the first one Fjord had ever copied and worn himself, almost four years later.

He'd done it with shaking hands in front of an abandoned shop window, just enough time to see that he hadn't left any of his mossy skin visible, and then he'd pulled his hood up, adjusted his pack against his back where it was light with food and a stolen star map, and disappeared.

But, perhaps he’s getting ahead of himself.

At ten, a handful of adults had said a number of clipped things Fjord doesn’t remember, and he’d never seen the shabby home or any of his halfbreed siblings again.

In their place had come what he’d originally thought to be an improvement: his new home, another orphanage for adolescents and teenagers, is larger and more crowded. A friendly, careful human woman had introduced herself as one of the house guardians and shown him the main building, the grassy outside grounds, the carriage house on the other end. It isn’t a ton of land and as he’d aged the more dilapidated parts had grown obvious, but at the time it had seemed unfathomably huge.

At ten, he starts to share a room with a scrawny, snubnosed ginger named Connor - human, he thinks, by way of the ears - who doesn’t hesitate to ask a lot of questions Fjord isn’t sure how to answer. The first rounds of this, of _where did you come from_ , _why do you look like that_ , _are your teeth that big because you eat rocks and stuff?_ \- of _I don’t know_ , _I’m… not sure_ , of _um, maybe,_ the nice lady puts a hand on his shoulder and encourages him to not be so shy, and so Fjord makes an effort to speak up more in the lessons he’s assigned.

At ten, he risks trying to be friendly with the other kids - some of them are other halfbreeds, he thinks, can see the pointy ear tips here or an inhuman stoutness of shoulder there, though none of them take kindly to him right away. Fjord slouches a lot, learns to pretend to laugh without showing his teeth (although his _teeth_ can’t be hidden so easily, something they do not let him forget), and realizes muzzily as the others do that his green skin does not bruise so easily or so visibly as theirs.

At eleven, Connor bashes him in the face with a two by four. Of all the parts of Fjord’s past left to rot in the sea, this day remains seared into his memory like a burn frozen over.

It’s a direct slam to the bottom of Fjord’s jaw, and while the numbness as precursor to a bruise is familiar, as he falls back in the dirt of the house’s grounds his only thought is that something else hurts, _bad_ , like all the blood in his body is suddenly howling to be let out - his upper lip feels swollen and sticky, and he can’t find it with his tongue, like his brain’s been scrambled up.

“Shit,” he hears, as if through saltwater, and he can’t make out any of the tittering that usually follows the cuss, “I think he’s bleeding.”

“I didn’ hit him that hard,” and that’s Connor for sure, Fjord recognizes the nasal tone. He’s trying to breathe, but he’s trying so hard it makes his nose hurt, and he still can’t get enough airin his lungs - he hopes he isn’t crying.

“No, but - look at him - it’s his _teeth_ \- “

Fjord abruptly feels his heart rip in two - his _teeth?_ Is one of them _gone_? The thought pulls at him tantalizingly, the idea of having a more normal profile, of one of those ugly, awkward tusks being out of his way -

He reaches up to his own face then, needing to know, and his hand hits something wet at the same time one of the other kids starts getting louder: “ - _g - get_ out _of here, are you stupid? Don’t you know if they taste their own blood they go_ \- “

Fjord can still feel his tooth, even on the side that hurts, and he sits up, feels more drips spill out over his chin - his jaw stings, his tooth - is fine, it’s there, but his _lip_ \- it’s like his mouth won’t open all the way, like something is _stuck_ -

Connor drops the plank, and Fjord squints up to see real fear in his eyes, his pale skin gone sickly so.

“Don’t _touch_ me,” he warns, backing up into another of the group that had cornered him in the first place. Fjord’s brows draw in, but when he tries to talk there’s that horrible pain at his lip again, the whole left side of his mouth feels swollen up and achey. When he next has the presence of mind to look up, Connor is already bolting for the house.

He doesn’t know how long he spends sitting out there, looking at nothing in particular and just feeling wetness - _blood_ , they’d been talking about blood - crust over his palm where he’s using it to cradle his face. Eventually he realizes that no one is coming to see if he’s alright, so he uses his other hand to push himself up - though standing takes effort, brings the numbness back all over his body and makes him shiver.

He makes his woozy way to the carriage house, the closest place he can think to go. He drags his feet to the door and stumbles into the nearest washroom, looks into the dirty mirror, and _screams_.

It’s immediately a mistake - before he squeezes eyes shut he can see how it tears at where his tusk is - is _stuck_ , has punctured through his upper lip - but he can’t stop screaming, either, sobs hoarsely like he’s being fucking exorcised until his brain _finally_ catches up with the terror and drops him to the floor like a sack of flour.

The carriage house is empty and stays that way, and later Fjord wakes and spends delirious hours over a small basin of water in that same washroom, dunking his chin in the water and trying to pry - trying to rip through -

He does fix it eventually - at least as much as he thinks it’s likely to be fixed. He learns later that the damage is permanent, that even after he’s been saved by the cleric they had to bring in from town and stitched back together by another of the house guardians (a gangly elven man with shaking hands), it will still scar.

But that’s later; for now, Fjord is swaying but satisfied, his bloodied tusk free and the water turned a deep pink-orange. He thinks _this is it_ , that his work is finished, and then he sits back on the floor of the washroom and his eyes catch on a brush someone has left hanging up on the wall - stiff bristles, thick metal handle. He thinks possibly it’s for a horse, and part of him insists that be his last thought on the matter.

He stands, only looking away from the brush handle to glance at himself in the mirror. He’s a mess, blurry and mangled but for the maddeningly perfect arcs of his orcish teeth. He tries to look at them distantly, studying them the way the elven guardian must study the chart of constellations on his wall that Fjord will be distracted by in two days when he is getting his lip stitched up:

_Ugly_ , he thinks right away, tries to amend, _clunky_. _Ostentatious_ is a good one he heard out of a book, a diction lesson on hard T sounds where he’d tried to ignore the way everyone stared at him whenever his teeth tripped him up -

He looks at the loose skin over his lip and forces that thought from his mind. All he has to replace it is the kernel of an idea, his attention sliding back to the brush. He takes it up, grips it by the bristled end and weighs it in his hand - it’s short, and the handle hooks dramatically to make it easy to store.

The first hit makes him gasp and stumble back, free hand reaching out for the wall of the small stone washroom. Spit slides down his chin, remains of his lip still staining it pink. Fjord’s eyes snap to the mirror.

His right tusk, the one he'd just attacked, is still protruding straight and tall from his misaligned gum - but the bone is scratched, just a little. Just enough.

He tries the hooked end next, shoves it in his mouth and yanks, but it’s not enough - so he starts swapping one tack for another and back again, breathing through his nose and forcing himself to be numb to everything but patience as he works, drools saliva and blood and thin strips of bone all over himself, thinks of nothing but the weight of the bone disappearing, cruel steel and his own hacksaw nails tearing himself apart. The ends blunt first, then the rest, slow and steady.

Fjord’s memories go fragile and cold again after this as though something in his brain rejects it, stoutly refusing to go back to that carriage house, the stifling washroom, the blood on his hands. All he remembers is shivering, his head pounding everywhere, maybe his mouth worst of all.

_Done_ , he’d thought at the time, before everything had gone black for the second time, this time right up until he’d woken up under the watchful, exhausted gaze of a cleric he hadn’t recognized, because the charitable human lady had found him and assumed he’d been dead.

Little had changed for him until age twelve, when Fjord had realized with true, urgent horror that he couldn’t have been _done -_ and that he never will be.

At twelve, Fjord’s tongue slicks over a stump of his old teeth and he’s shocked to find it _hurts_ , that something wet and sharp sits at dead center of the bony rubble he’s used to. He assumes he’d merely missed something, and pushes it from his mind.

Two months later, the sharp points have grown wider, just barely rounding out his bottom lip from the inside. _Some god_ , he thinks, mouth clamped shut against the feeling, against the exterior aches and bruises he still collects from his peers, _any god_. Desperate, he starts bandaging the corners of his underbite, covering the mess.

Another two months and his unforgiving, godless teeth break monstrously through the bandages and breach his lips, left point almost resting on the gnarled skin that has permanently shaped his mouth and all he has left to think is _no, no, not again_ , _please_.

At thirteen, Fjord runs away. 

He dumps his serving of dinner into a sack into a satchel, ghosts into the elven guardian’s office using one of his freshly ruined teeth to aid in picking the lock, steals the parchment star map off his wall, and breaks for the door. Past the grounds wet with dew and out the front gate, guilt for taking something that didn’t belong to him pushing him faster toward the dirty alleyways of the surrounding town.

His skin is a dead giveaway that he’s somewhere he shouldn’t be, a runaway from somewhere or other, and he huddles into his too-large cloak, sets up on a backstreet to wait out the night.

The next day, Fjord affects a deceptive laziness of step and melts into the small throng of people going about their business - when he comes across a boarded-up storefront, sure to be empty, he stops and pulls his hood back, focusing on his reflection.

It’s still a blighted mess. He can’t make out the swelling under his eyes but knows it’s there, a combination of tears, insomnia, and the alleycat he’d been too despondent to shoo away from him the night before. When he brings his hands up to his face they tremble like an addict’s, but he’s not doing it to pick at his mouth this time. By comparison, the cradle of his palms he slips his jaw into feels gentle, and it’s such a departure from how he’s used to being touched that it almost throws him off.

Thankfully, his trick still goes off without a hitch. All it takes is the memory of a sharp chin and a stuck-up frown, a memory of having his hair hacked off and his body judged before his little life had been completely uprooted.

When he opens his eyes to his reflection again, they’re brown and white, instead of what Luca from his lessons always called ‘moldy yellow.’ His natural green skin has faded to peach, his nose a completely different shape - even his scar is missing from the cartography of his face.

He frowns, trying it out, seeing the weary healer in the right light. He doesn’t like it, in fact, but this is not the time to think about that.

He nods at himself, once. He pulls his hood up. He adjusts his pack.

The illusion isn’t forever, but at thirteen, Fjord knows exactly where to go. Wrapped in the unexpected confidence of anonymity, he follows the road until it opens out to the docks he’s never seen in person before. There are a few vessels tied down, and he makes an utterly uneducated guess toward one that looks large but not as fancy as some of the others, where a pair of dwarves are chatting, tones neutral.

He hangs back at first, but one of them - a female, he thinks, with a leather eyepatch and a long braid over her thick shoulder - stops talking immediately, visible eye clearly marking Fjord around her companion.

“Help you?” she asks, and the other dwarf turns, his bare arms crossed.

Fjord tries to stand up straighter, for once grateful for the extra bulk he’d been well-assured was not a _natural_ trait. He clears his throat and says, in the lowest voice he can muster: “Yeah.”

His nerves spike again - but it’s not bad. It’s not bad, it’s workable, and maybe some errant god is watching his steps after all. He inclines his head toward the ship behind them. “I’m looking to secure passage,” he tries, heart hammering in his chest, causing the same stings of spark as the blacksmith further into town.

“Where to?” the man asks, and Fjord is scrambling to read his tone of voice. Unlike his friend, he has both eyes visible, and a little brown pipe sticking out from under the groomed thick of his mustache. Intricate sleeve tattoos spiral down both arms, and Fjord tries not to stare.

_Please,_ he thinks, again. Empathy is all he has. This is the only risk he has left to take. “Wherever I’d be useful,” he says, tipping his head demurely downward. “Out of here.”

The male dwarf _hm_ s, though Fjord’s disguised ears quirk to hear something in it. Amusement, he hopes, though even pity would be acceptable. He has no dignity left to bargain with, and he’s treading just above the decision to stop pretending he does.

“Brave of you,” his partner says, and Fjord looks back to her, very nearly balks at the stern set of her one evident eye. _You have no idea_. “What’s your name?”

“Oh,” he says - and then because it will sound more natural than any lie, “Fjord. It’s Fjord.” His hand feels clammy on the strap of his bag, but he can’t make himself move it, too scared to unclench his fist.

“Someone’s looking for him,” he hears, the rough turn of the man’s voice, and he’s certain this is the end of it. But -

“Sure. So, Fjord - what do you do?”

He means to come off brusque and world-weary, but this question pulls him up short enough that his diction lessons take over. “I - pardon?”

The woman gestures with one hand, noncommittal. “What do you _do?_ Doesn’t have to be whatever they’re after you for, as long as it’s worth the risk.”

Later, much later, Fjord will recall fondly that he’s being toyed with just here - but in the moment, he’s terrified. The strap of his bag slips through his sweaty palm and he blurts, “I - I can navigate using the stars.” Of course it isn’t true - but of all the things he’s ever trusted, the night sky is the only one to have never led him astray, and he clings to it, to this opportunity, to the illusion that he knows will wear off too soon.

The female dwarf nods, evidently satisfied, but her companion eyes Fjord slowly, toe to nose.

“And what’ll you pay us to take you?” he asks. _Shit_ , Fjord thinks, has no one to give him demerits for it anymore. Before he can scrap the whole attempt and vow to think of an answer to this question - _stupid that he hadn’t expected it, what was he thinking?_ \- the man takes an elbow to his arm from his partner, and Fjord blinks.

“He’ll work for it,” she says gruffly, a voice that scares the shit out of him at the time. She nods at him. “We’ll work you to the bone for this. You know that, right?”

It takes all of Fjord’s wits to simply say, “okay,” and he rushes to add, “yes ma’am. Um, yessir.”

Which is how at thirteen, Fjord meets the heads of the crew he’ll stay with for the next decade of his life. He learns that the man is called Law, the woman called Flora, and that they are siblings who share a constant of _fucking with him_. They don’t even blink when they meet him down in the hull as Fjord is trying to make himself presentable - his real self, the illusion long gone - and lock eyes with a half-orc.

_Broadly what I expected_ , Law pronounces evenly, and his sister hits him.

_Crafty_ , is what she tells Fjord directly. It sounds like a compliment, which he marvels is the opposite of how this tends to go. Flora starts counting off on her fingers. _Anyway - don’t ralph in here. Don’t start shit. Don’t get in the way_.

Fjord nods vigorously until he’s afraid his zeal may end in him breaking the first rule. The conversation about being a monster, about leaving anyone else alone, doesn’t come.

He learns that the two of them also expected him to disappear at their nearest port only a day away, saw a punk kid looking for an adventure who would get bored and want to walk back to his hometown by day three. He stays with them for their next trip, which takes a week and a half. Their next takes a week. Then, a full month. The _King Protea_ has a crew of twenty, until suddenly it has a crew of twenty-one.

Fjord stays, and he absorbs knowledge like a sponge - sailing, fishing, herbs and alcohols and a dreadful mix of the two. He learns how to lie, he learns how much to tell of the truth, and _no one_ will teach him how to cheat at guts. Aside from that, the one thing he can’t get the hang of after three months at sea is navigation, which makes Flora laugh so hard she’s almost ill on his boots.

At thirteen, five months into his new life, Fjord takes out the dagger he’d been loaned with a sigh. He sequesters himself in the hall while the others are either sleeping or on deck, flips the little thing in his hand until he can get the pommel at the resilient curves of his tusks, and gets to work, chewing on the unforgiving steel and spitting bone until they’re chipped to inoffensive nubs again.

It’s easier than it had been, he thinks. It’s better, now that he knows it’s worth it.

He doesn’t know how long it takes until he’s leaning against the solid wood of the bulkhead, trying not to drift off from the ache, the itch of loss. It makes him fidgety, so after a short while he tests his ability to stand and wobbles his way up top, sliding his dagger back into its sheath as he goes.

The night air is crisp, the tides generous, and he finds himself leaning over the portside rail, regulating his breathing with the breeze carrying through his slightly too-long hair.

Law finds him there shortly after, though he doesn’t make any move to intrude, only leans against the rail himself and stares at the ocean, sharing the space.

After a moment, he says, more softly than Fjord had expected, “heard you cryin’ down there.”

_Shit._ “Oh,” Fjord offers quietly. “Sorry,” he says, because it’s easier than trying to explain.

Law rolls one shoulder, almost a shrug. When he speaks next, his tone hasn’t shifted from the same gentle curiosity. “Homesick?”

And Fjord looks up, eyes flicking from one brilliant point of light over the open ocean to the next, shaping constellations, and says, “no sir.”

**Author's Note:**

> i'm on [tumblr](http://losebetter.tumblr.com) and [twitter](http://twitter.com/losebetter) if you want to say hey! o/ i've basically been vacillating between work and crying about fjord in both places, so feel free to join me in this endeavor.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [A New Skin To Hide The Scars](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14585976) by [raiyuki76](https://archiveofourown.org/users/raiyuki76/pseuds/raiyuki76)




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